con

Important: new Facebook hack

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If it happens to you, this is how it goes. You get a friend request from someone you know – they may even be Facebook friends with you already – and when you accept it, you get a message asking how you are. If you reply to that, you’re now into a long conversation that says it’s about the CFDA. Reportedly that’s the Something Federal Domestic Assistance that offers grants and your friend says they saw your name on a list of people who are being awarded them.

I’ve never heard of this lot but I am applying for various grants to do certain projects and, I’ll put my hand up, I was fooled.

What happens next is that your pal says it’s best if they send you a Facebook link to someone else. I don’t want to name the one I was sent in case that’s another unfortunate soul being used, but when you click to send that person a friend request, they accept and suddenly you’re in a conversation with them too.

That’s where I got out.

Call me slow.

Especially as my friend is a poet and her messages were full of mistakes. I did just reckon she was in a hurry, but still, there are standards and she wouldn’t write like that.

So I’m slow and thick but watch out for it happening to you, okay? I don’t know where the story would’ve ended going but I don’t think the odds are high that we’d like it.

Harder than it looks: big event takes a Tumbl

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Before I began producing the odd little event, I thought it was all pretty much like wedding planning. It is, but give me a wedding any day: the church isn’t likely to back out at the last minute and if any guests don’t appear, that’s one less family row to worry about.

I have found it profoundly satisfying to sit in an audience knowing that this thing around me is happening because of me. Other people are hosting it, my work is entirely done – until afterwards, anyway, when you start settling up the bills – I can just enjoy it like everybody else.

But I can’t imagine the difficulties of organising the a weekend-long event with very many star guests and a hoped-for 3,500 attendees. The makers of Dashcon 2014, a convention devoted to but not in any way endorsed by Tumblr, don’t seem to have imagined the difficulties either.

It only took a few hours for DashCon 2014 to degenerate into the most catastrophic fan convention in recent memory.

Over the course of one weekend, the organizers took $17,000 from conventiongoers as part of an emergency fundraising drive, failed to pay any of their high-profile guests, and attempted to compensate disappointed ticket-holders by offering them an “extra” hour in a children’s ball pit. The ball pit only fit around six people. There was apparently not a very long queue.

Over the course of a weekend, DashCon 2014 descended into chaos – Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, The Daily Dot (13 July 2014)

The story goes on.